


Erasure

by thedevilchicken



Series: Therapy [4]
Category: Batman Begins (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, M/M, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-06-26
Packaged: 2018-04-06 07:03:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4212429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything is unravelling. The speed at which it’s happening surprises even him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Erasure

**Author's Note:**

> Fourth and final part of _Therapy_ \- follows Therapy, Deception and Adversaries. Only a decade in the making!

Gotham is at its best and its worst after dark.

Jonathan works days at Arkham Asylum. The directorship was unsurprisingly vacant once again when he called on the phone from Metropolis to enquire regarding open positions but he had no intention of taking back up his former employment, much to the board’s dismay. What he required was a respectable position, senior but not _too_ senior, responsible but not _too_ responsible, working with patients but nothing that would take up so very much of his time as stepping back into the building with that impressive but ultimately thankless title emblazoned on his door. He’s been a senior staff psychiatrist at Arkham for eleven months now. He’s well respected. It suits him well. 

Jonathan does _not_ work nights at Arkham Asylum. He leaves at 6pm daily, promptly, and he makes his way home. Home is an old but tidy three-storey brownstone with narrow stairs but well-proportioned rooms, rooms that do of course seem somewhat lacking in depth and breadth after his six month sojourn in Metropolis but that are frankly more room than he actually requires. He’s decorated sparsely but tastefully, well-chosen pieces that accent the house’s many original features, wooden bookcases and re-upholstered vintage leather chairs, none of the stark contrast monochrome of the Metropolis apartment that had to suit Bruce Wayne’s style rather than his. It’s a home he can afford on his Arkham salary, which was perhaps the most important prerequisite. He finds this suits him well. 

There are papers on the desk in his office at Arkham waiting to be filed, notes to be transcribed, but he’ll take care of that tomorrow. He shuffles them together and folds his jacket over his arm, picks up his briefcase and locks his office door behind him as he leaves on the chime of 6 o’clock. He says goodnight to the nurses at their station, has a small, salutary smile and nod for the guards, and he leaves the building with the doors all locking behind him. He takes the monorail from the Narrows to the corner of his block, briefcase settled on his knee as the carriage sways, and then walks briskly to his door. It’s summer in Gotham and the days are too long and too hot, he thinks, as a trickle of sweat runs down the length of his spine, beneath his shirt. This heat would drive anyone crazy. 

He doesn’t work nights at Arkham but that’s not to say he doesn’t work at night at all. He’s been working very, very hard since sometime shortly before his return to Gotham, working quite diligently indeed. He’s been preempting and supplanting and whispering in the ear of the old guard of the city’s organised crime and moving in with something new that masquerades as continuity. He’s been taking over, quickly, incisively, with such precision and decision that no one has been able to stand in his way because at best they’ve barely known to expect him and frankly even now they barely know he’s there at all. He’s a ghost of a whisper behind a rumour, hidden by design, but Gotham is _his_ city now. Gotham is the Scarecrow’s city.

There are five messages on his voicemail when he finally turns on his cell and logs into his professional mailbox. Four of them are potential day patients for the asylum making arrangements to see him in the coming week; he’s still a very fine doctor, and his apparent success in the matter of Bruce Wayne’s treatment and recovery has only increased the reach of his reputation. One of them, the final one, is Bruce. 

“Call me when you get this,” Bruce says, then hangs up abruptly. He left the message three hours ago. Bruce doesn’t call without a reason, at least not outside of their careful, meticulous schedule, and so this is the message he will respond to first, before even considering the others. He knows the number.

“Have you seen the news?” Bruce asks. He hasn’t, he says, and so Bruce tells him. 

An armed robbery. The bank - _Scarecrow’s_ bank, and so he’ll have to respond. His lieutenants will be waiting for his call because there is no high-level crime in Gotham City now that is not sanctioned by the Scarecrow. The buck stops with him and only him.

“They left a calling card,” Bruce says. 

It’s a joker. 

***

“What’s your greatest fear, Bruce?” he asked, once upon a time.

“Bats,” Bruce told him, without a second’s thought or hesitation, and so that’s what he’s become. They’ve made his fear the city’s fear, but maybe also its greatest hope. 

What the public sees is Batman, superhuman, indestructible, cleaning up Gotham’s filthy streets night by night. There’s been so much crime in Gotham and for so long that it’s taken quite a while - it’s taken _months_ \- for anyone to understand that street gangs and car theft rings and seedy curbside prostitution are no longer the norm there. Batman’s put a stop to that. The streets are safer for it, if still not precisely safe, with all organised crime falling in line in a curiously civilised manner. To the average citizen, Scarecrow is Batman’s opposite and his enemy; they’re sure that he exists though no one’s ever seen him. The few that venture a contentious opinion on the matter say that he’s been just as instrumental in Gotham’s reinvention as Batman has, in his own way. Drugs are safer, theft is down, carjacking virtually unheard of and prostitution tightly regulated. Organised crime is a fact but it doesn’t have to be a burden. There’s not been an organised hit in months. 

What the average career criminal there in Gotham sees is not such a very different picture. There have always been gangs and families there, hierarchies of one manner or another all vying for control, and so they’ve seen very little change since new management installed itself so quietly. Jonathan had aerosolized his suggestion serum and all it took was a quick spritz to the face of Gotham’s top men, one by one, a word in their ear as Batman held their arms behind their backs, and the Scarecrow was suddenly pulling all the strings. No one complains, except the ones who wouldn’t fall in line and found themselves on a one-way trip to Blackgate. Everyone else is enjoying a whole new era of prosperity.

Syndicates and gangs and families have begun to work together in a way and on a level that even the most dedicated denizens of the police department would find it difficult to actually prove. Detective Gordon in Major Crimes is the one who’s come the closest but he’s still quite far away; Jonathan knows this because he’s met Gordon, more than once. He suspects Dr Crane is a physician to the mob but he can’t prove it because that’s at best only partially true, his cover to be around the men he’s seen around so frequently. And besides, violent crime has reduced quite dramatically and business revenues across the city are improving day on day. Ordinary citizens thank Batman and suspect the Scarecrow; only the middle-management of the city’s organised crime and the more eccentric boys in blue of the Gotham PD hear darker whispers of the other man behind the bat but even they aren’t sure it’s more than a fairy story, a cautionary tale. No one has seen the Scarecrow, at least not that they’re aware of. He’s been very careful of that.

Jonathan steps into the room. It’s the kitchen of an excellent though little-frequented Italian restaurant owned by an old lieutenant of Falcone’s who’s now one of his; it’s warm from cooking and the summer day’s lingering heat, an aroma of garlic and herbs in the air and three of his lieutenants are already there, seated around a small table in the corner where the chef takes his meals on the rare occasions that they’re actually open. Jonathan is wearing his mask but no one says a word about it as they’ve all seen it before, are of the small number who have except for the fourth man there, the odd one out, the one with the lank green hair and the gnarled Chelsea smile who watches him approach with surprisingly, disarmingly sharp eyes. He doesn’t like him. It’s an instant dislike and he strongly suspects that it’s mutual.

“So you’re the one they say doesn’t exist,” he says. “Scarecrow.”

Jonathan inclines his masked head in concession of the point as he hangs back by the door. He’s not concerned; he has four guards outside the door and a canister of serum in his jacket pocket, upon which his left hand rests. The man across the room has been disarmed, and Jonathan knows Batman is there somewhere, watching, waiting, just in case. Batman is always there. “And what do I call you?” he asks. 

“You can call me Joker.” 

Jonathan laughs, the sound harsh through the vocal modulator there in his mask, making everyone flinch but the man at whom it was aimed.. “Fitting,” he says. “And what can I do for you, Mr Joker?”

“I want in,” he says. 

“Into what?”

He raises his brows, spreads his hands in their dirty white gloves wide over the steel-topped chef’s table. “Your organisation.” 

Jonathan crosses his arms over his chest. “Entry level employment here does not pay well, I’m afraid,” he tells him. “And I have no lack of lieutenants.” 

The Joker nods. He stands. And, as Jonathan watches, he proceeds to shove a stainless steel dessert fork straight into the side of the nearest man’s neck. It’s impressive, Jonathan thinks, just how quickly the escape of blood from what is likely a shredded carotid leaves his lieutenant’s body slumped dead over the table. The Joker has solved his own problem quite effectively and decisively; he’s made himself an opening in the organisation and Jonathan has to admit he’s not seen such verve for quite some time. He can’t say no. He’s been put in an awkward position.

“Well played,” he says, and the Joker takes a low and ostentatious bow at this. “It seems we have an opening after all.”

The Joker shoves the body from the chair to the floor and takes its place, smearing the blood across the table with the cuff of his suit. Jonathan crosses the room and he takes his seat. 

And thus a dangerous game begins. 

***

He meets Bruce once every week in his office in Arkham. An hour on Thursday morning is blocked out for Bruce Wayne’s continued therapy and despite all of the playboy billionaire’s excesses, the staff there is now accustomed to the fact that he never misses a session. It’s become normal over the weeks and months that Bruce arrives exactly ten minutes early in one of a variety of barely road-legal supercars and waits patiently on a seat in the hallway. He’ll be sporting a suit that cost more than the average orderly’s monthly wages and a watch that’s quite literally worth its weight in gold, toying with his cellphone and flashing smiles at the nurses, both male and female. They try not to pay him too much attention and Jonathan finds it quite amusing that they do so when they fail so often and so miserably. 

Ten minutes pass and just as normal Jonathan opens the door right on time and not a moment earlier; he’s the only one who seems wholly unaffected by Bruce Wayne’s presence. Bruce rises and steps into the office, tucking his phone into his inside pocket. No one pays any attention when Jonathan locks the door and lowers the blinds behind them because they understand it’s all just part of the eccentric billionaire’s eccentric confidentiality agreement. Jonathan has them well trained, which wasn’t exactly an expensive use of his talents. They trust him. He’s a little stiff, perhaps a little formal, but they trust him.

They take their usual seats by the window, the blinds there open to the view over the courtyard where they used to sit, at night, when daylight had still been far too much for Bruce. They’ve come a long way since then, two years and more work than Jonathan cares to contemplate going into the careful, meticulous construction of the man that’s sitting there with him. Bruce looks comfortable, his expression open, his entire demeanour entirely reminiscent of his photos in the tabloids and the videos on the news, from both before his breakdown and now, after. What Jonathan knows that no one else could possibly know is that it’s a solid veneer fixed tightly in place over something else entirely. Underneath, he’s still terrified. He could never be anything else.

They don’t talk about what’s really on their mind because in spite of all of Jonathan’s precautions he’s not so naive as to think there’s not always a chance that someone is listening, monitoring; the door is locked and blinds lowered just in case Bruce slips. They talk instead about Bruce’s week. They talk about the black eye that Bruce is currently sporting and Bruce tells him an elaborate tale of a bar fight that Jonathan supposes did take place but wasn’t actually the initial cause but the cover-up. The sessions are a test to ensure that Bruce isn’t slipping and for eleven months he hasn’t slipped at all; he’s only getting more confident with time and there’s something curiously unsettling in that. Jonathan sometimes wonders if he hasn’t done his work a fraction _too_ well, if he hasn’t a little unstitching to do.

“We’re out of time for today,” Jonathan says, as the hands on the clock by the door tick over to an hour. 

Bruce nods, leaning forward from where he’s been lounging in the chair there in the sunlight under the window. “Thanks, doc,” he says, pulling himself up to his full height and Jonathan is struck, as he still is on occasion, by the presence of this man he’s created. They shake hands as they do every week, palms both slightly slick as apparently Arkham’s ancient air conditioning system is not quite up to scratch where the Gotham City summer is concerned, and Jonathan looks up at him, at the perfectly easy white-toothed smile and the tan and the artistically messy hair, the loosened knot of his tie. Bruce Wayne is magnetic despite his black eye, physical, the centre of everyone else’s attention and sometimes even his, though what he prefers is the _other_ Bruce, the one he rarely sees these days though he knows just how to bring him out if needed. “See you next week.”

Jonathan echoes this sentiment and then Bruce is gone, letting himself out of the locked office, and Jonathan doesn’t watch him leave. He quite pointedly doesn’t. He returns to his desk and slips his files into a drawer, turns to the cabinet and takes out his notebook full of shorthand because, after all, he still has patients to see; no one was reluctant to sign Harvey Dent back into his care and no one other than him has ever been able to inspire a remotely positive reaction in Dick Grayson whose identity as Nightwing was never conclusively proven one way or another but whose presence there in Arkham has been mandated by the city. Of course, no one else knows exactly why. To all appearances, Bruce is just one of a list of celebrity patients under Jonathan’s care.

The day passes quickly, as they always do when he’s busy and busy is Arkham’s default state. Harvey is doing very well; although in his previous tenure Jonathan had enjoyed toying with the fracture of Harvey’s personality he’s been doing an excellent job of stitching it back together ever since his return. Tarot cards full of choices and decisions have been shuffled back to playing cards, playing cards to dice, Platonic solids with choices that Jonathan has helped him to whittle down from twenty to twelve, twelve to eight, a six-sided cube, a four-sided pyramid that Harvey used to throw in the air like the coin that had begun it all, the coin to which Jonathan has recently returned him. It’s the same scored silver dollar that he arrived with there in Arkham. He thinks it will make the issue all the more striking and apparent when he takes the coin away and Harvey’s choices become suddenly, dizzingly infinite.

He leaves today at 6pm as he does every day. He locks his office and he takes the monorail back to his brownstone, he showers and he changes and then he picks up his briefcase and he leaves again as the sun begins to set. It’s still warm, the heat almost oppressive with the strange humidity drifting in from the docks that makes the air almost stagnant and wet. Three blocks from his door he steps into the back seat of a waiting Bentley, upmarket for the area though not wholly out of place. His brownstone is in a relatively pleasant location, especially pleasant since Batman’s arrival. 

“Good evening, doctor,” the driver says, with the briefest of glances into the rearview mirror as they pull into the street. 

“Good evening, Alfred,” he replies. “To the cave?” 

Bruce is already in the suit when they arrive. Alfred still disapproves but he’s never been overly difficult to persuade; perhaps three weeks after their return to Gotham Bruce went to him, told him his plans, told him everything he’d discussed with Jonathan about Dick Grayson’s former occupation, about Superman in Metropolis and Green Arrow in Star City and though Alfred did, to his credit, at least attempt to protest, Bruce was firm about it. Bruce was convincing. Alfred discussed the matter with Jonathan shortly thereafter and Jonathan told him that with careful monitoring and their continued support and assistance it might be just what the doctor ordered, so to speak. He didn’t even have to use the serum, at least not very much of it.

The faithful if laconic butler takes his leave for the evening and Jonathan can see Bruce watching his exit, waiting until he’s actually vacated the room until he speaks. Alfred doesn’t know as much as he thinks he knows. They have secrets, or Jonathan does.

“He tried to kill me again last night,” Bruce says, Batman says, once Alfred’s gone. Jonathan doesn’t have to ask who he means because there’s only one man in Gotham who’s _really_ trying to kill him as the rest of them are just trying to remain stoically under his radar. It’s been six weeks since they met the Joker, almost seven, and Jonathan has found that although he’s managed to predict his behaviour for the majority of the time, the man’s dubious grip on reality makes him particularly and frustratingly difficult to read. He’s clearly lucid for the most part but his thought processes themselves are almost entirely elusive; if Jonathan could study him for any length of time then he’s certain they’d unfold quite simply under his expert gaze but the opportunity to do so has yet to present itself. He honestly doubts that it ever will.

“I’ll deal with it,” Jonathan says, and he means it. It’s a campaign against Batman that he can’t have the Joker waging though he understands the risks involved in halting it. The Joker will have uncomfortable questions about the potentially reciprocal nature of his involvement with Batman that Jonathan won’t be able to adequately answer and he knows, much to his displeasure, that the man’s truly bizarre psyche has rendered him almost entirely immune to Jonathan’s preferred psychopharmacological methods. He’s tried. Repeatedly, to his stubborn and unstinting disappointment. Still, they were always the easy route; he’ll just have to resort to more conventional means to get his point across.

Jonathan takes off his glasses, rubs the bridge of his nose. He hates the heat and the sluggish pall it casts over him but fortunately it’s not something that usually penetrates the caves beneath Wayne Manor, the caves with their bats and their Bat. He takes a seat by the expansive screens of Batman’s computer system, leans back and crosses his legs at the knee as he cools and clears slowly.

“What are you planning to do?” Batman asks him, and Jonathan makes an unhappy face for a second that’s associated just as closely with the fact that he’s still making distinctions between versions of Bruce in his head as it is with the fact that Bruce has asked the question in the first place. He’s been becoming more inquisitive, questioning his motives and decisions much more openly since Jonathan made him Batman in addition to Bruce Wayne and while it’s welcome in the vast majority of situations, a kind of sensible check and balance, this is not one of them. “It’s not only me he wants dead, Jonathan.”

Jonathan pauses as he considers this, drumming the fingers of one hand against the desktop to his right. He knows it really can’t go on. He knows it’s a serious problem, a spanner in the works, so to speak, that they need to be rid of if his comfortable control of Gotham City is to continue. He’s genuinely made it a better place, he thinks, and he can’t let one intelligent, anarchistic psychopath ruin all of his hard work. 

“I think I might have to kill him,” he says at last, not without distaste at the notion. 

“And I can’t?”

“Of course not.” 

Bruce leans against the desktop. It’s a much more impressive lair than it had been in Nightwing’s day, Jonathan has to admit; between Lucius Fox, Wayne Enterprises’ gadgetry, Bruce’s personal funds and the deep pockets of Lexcorp’s shell corporations within shell corporations, they’ve furnished it with every convenience the modern vigilante could ever want for and more. 

“Of course not,” Bruce repeats, and he means it. Jonathan’s ingrained that particular rule in him so deeply that he couldn’t go against it if he wanted to, and he doesn’t want to, is just unimpressed by the notion of Jonathan getting his hands dirty, his opinion evident in the way he flexes his gloves hands into and out of fists at his sides.

“Are you going out?” Jonathan asks, not just to change the subject but finding that a convenient side effect.

“Do you need me?”

“No.”

“Then yes,” Bruce says. He still sounds irritated and so Jonathan stands, straightens his tie and steps toward him, acutely aware of the hot displeasure in Batman’s eyes. Bruce’s eyes. 

“I’ll be home by two,” he says. “Be there.” He pauses then, further assessing Bruce’s mood for a second by his stance and his gestures and the look on his masked face before he adds, a little more carefully, “Please.”

Once upon a time, he knows _please_ would not have been necessary.

***

The bathroom window is broken and there’s blood on the tiles, drops smeared over the floor heading into the upstairs corridor, smudges on the walls that he can see in the half-light of the streetlights through the windows. Jonathan’s hand goes to the canister there in his pocket but two steps into the bedroom he fully understands the situation at hand. Bruce is the one who’s bleeding. He did not expect this, but he’s tells himself he’s prepared for it. He has to be, not only because he’s a doctor, sometimes the mob doctor Gordon suspects him of being, but because he’s stitched him up dozens of times before this. Bruce will be fine. 

But Jonathan curses under his breath as he goes to him. Bruce is on the floor by the bed, face-down, and so Jonathan turns him because as much as he dislikes the idea of moving him without full knowledge of his current condition, that’s the only way he’s going to be able to tell if he’s alive while he’s wearing the suit. It weighs just as much as it looks like it might and the weight of Bruce in it is far from easy to manipulate, but he pulls him over onto his back and he finds, mercifully, that he’s breathing. He’s just unconscious. Jonathan lets out a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding and then he sets about getting Bruce out of the suit. He needs to see exactly where the blood is coming from. He needs to know just how serious this is.

It’s not a simple affair to remove the suit without Bruce’s participation and he can’t help but think it would be simpler were they back at the manor or in Bruce’s city centre apartment, perhaps the rooms under Wayne Enterprises that Jonathan’s not supposed to visit but has on occasion just to get the lay of the land, just in case. There are facilities in all of those places that Jonathan’s brownstone is acutely and immediately lacking, he thinks, as he removes the top half of Bruce’s suit in scuffed, blood-slicked sections. The scuffs aren’t the usual markers of gunfire, looking more like he’s been set about with knives and that’s a suspicion Jonathan confirms when he finds the gash in his upper arm, there by his armpit. For a startling, jarring second, in a burst of sickly adrenaline that chills him despite the oppressive heat, it occurs to Jonathan that perhaps the knife nicked his axillary artery but there’s not nearly enough blood for that. He’s highly displeased with his momentary misdiagnosis. 

He finds the blood loss is not inconsiderable but not nearly enough to be fatal and so he disinfects and sews him up there on the bedroom floor and then pulls him up, hefting him bodily onto the bed in a series of almost embarrassingly graceless jerks that covers him in Bruce’s blood. It’s not the first time he’s been covered in blood, he reminds himself, not even the first time it’s been Bruce’s, though somehow this time it feels significant. An inch or two in any direction and his axillary or brachial arteries could have been severed. Bruce would have been dead on his floor. It rankles that he’s unsure if they missed from sloppy marksmanship or by design.

He cleans the floor by the bed because he can’t stand to look at the blood any longer. He cleans the walls in the corridor outside as best he can, sweeps the broken glass from the bathroom into bags for disposal as he makes a point of not thinking about how he’ll retaliate because he already knows whose work this was, it’s very plain. He cleans Bruce down carefully with a bright white washcloth and a bowl full of warm water that both rapidly turn a sickly shade of reddish-pink that makes him scowl uncharacteristically with something not unlike annoyance. He takes Bruce’s pulse, fingers pressed to his warm neck, breathing an odd sigh of muted relief as he finds it’s still strong. He doesn’t call Alfred because he’s not sure yet how he’ll explain. And then he takes his gun from the drawer by the bed and settles himself in the leather armchair by the window to wait and watch and scheme. He despises guns. It irks him that it’s come to this.

“I told you he was trying to kill me,” Bruce says and Jonathan starts awake; almost three hours have passed, judging from the clock on the nightstand, early morning sunlight filtering through the half-closed blinds and casting shadows over Bruce’s gaunt face. He’d failed to realise just how drained he’d felt, as if he were the one suffering the blood loss and not Bruce at all. He pulls himself stiffly from the chair and goes to the bed, settles on the edge as he checks Bruce’s pulse again, Bruce eyeing the bloodstained shirt that he’s still wearing because at some point, somehow, Jonathan has forgotten to change out of it. That thought bothers him more than it should. It very nearly angers him. He blames the incipient heat of the early morning for his rancor.

“I told you I’ll deal with it,” Jonathan replies.

“He knows.” 

“Knows what, precisely?”

“Who I am,” Bruce says. “Maybe who you are.”

Of course he does, Jonathan thinks, coldly or maybe hotly and the fact that he feels anything at all over this makes him clench his fists. 

Of course he knows. He should have taken care of this weeks ago. 

***

In the midst of it all, because naturally it _would_ be in the midst of it all, Clark comes to visit. 

Alfred likes him because there’s very little about Clark that’s not extremely easy to like, from the endearing way in which he doesn’t quite fit in with his grand surroundings there at the manor to the way Bruce seems to genuinely enjoy his company, the awkwardness when Alfred brings food and he tries to thank him without sounding too enthusiastic or not enough and he really can’t do enough to help. Alfred would probably still like him were he to be let in on his little secret, Jonathan thinks. After all, he’s aided and abetted two separate but inexorably linked masked vigilantes by this particular point in time; an alien superhero likely wouldn’t be all that much of a stretch for him.

It’s seemed natural since Clark’s arrival for Jonathan to be present in the evenings, after work, catching a taxi out to Wayne Manor from Arkham’s front step, because Clark is not only Bruce’s friend but his. Alfred remains thoroughly unperturbed by Jonathan’s presence, has clearly grown quite used to him in the year since Bruce’s return from Metropolis. He’s still grateful that Bruce has made such a very successful recovery, more so because Dick is still improving even now, albeit slowly. Perhaps the two still aren’t on precisely friendly terms but they’re cordial at the very least. Jonathan, however, is absolutely certain that if Alfred knew about their past what Clark knows about their past then their cordiality would be strained at the very least. Even if it has, for almost a year, been resolutely their past. They’re perhaps more than doctor and patient but they’re no longer lovers. That had to end. Currently, Alfred’s opinion of Jonathan’s professionality is almost justified.

“What do you think of the place?” Jonathan asks when he’s alone with Clark, when Bruce has slipped out to help Alfred with the drinks. 

Clark’s perhaps a little flustered by this as he looks around the enormous sitting room with its high, vaulted ceilings and highly polished hardwood floors. “It’s amazing,” he says, like he can’t believe he’s staying there, like he can’t believe he knows its owner even though he’s been a good friend of Lex Luthor for years. Which of the two is the richest is actually quite a closely guarded secret and the subject of some debate. 

“I think it’s a bit over-the-top,” Jonathan tells him, like he’s confiding something, and gives Clark a small, almost conspiratorial smile. “How’s Lex?”

The blush is unmistakable but Clark is saved by Bruce and Alfred’s return with trays of iced lemonade that are a thoroughly excellent way to ward off the early evening heat. Clark reminisces about his childhood on the farm, working with his father in the fields through the summers and how his mom would bring them lemonade, how he misses him now he’s gone and Jonathan feigns the appropriate sympathy for the loss of the man with whom he shares a name. Bruce still hasn’t managed to marshall his expression completely on the subject of parental demises, however, and smiles only stiffly, but Jonathan supposes that in itself is appropriate. Clark looks somewhat abashed when he realises because everyone - _everyone_ \- knows Bruce Wayne’s story. At least that part of it. 

Clark works for the Daily Planet now he’s graduated very close to the top of his class. He tells them both that he’s not sure if he was employed because he knows two of the richest men in the country or not but Perry White’s probably disappointed that he’s not out bringing in the scoop on them both on a weekly basis. Perry seems to think scruples should be left at the door where journalism’s concerned and Jonathan refrains from telling Clark that he really doesn’t have the correct temperament for journalism. He has principles, for one thing. For another, he’s managed to entirely miss the fact that Lex has been, for some time, winning over certain well-placed and influential people in the country with the use of a mind-altering narcotic agent. Jonathan wonders if he’ll be surprised when Lex’s long game finally comes to fruition and in a year or two he finally announces his presidential candidacy, to rousing support from all quarters. Part of him does also have to wonder whether Clark will still be living then or if Lex will have found an effective way to kill him. It would be a shame, but that’s Lex’s business. He wouldn’t dream of interfering any further than he already has, at least not for the moment. 

It’s the fifth night of Clark’s stay, he’s due to leave in the morning and they’re all still awake at midnight, not that that’s at all unusual for Bruce but Clark will probably attribute this to his rather active social life. Bruce took him out clubbing in the city a couple of times earlier in the week but Clark unsurprisingly has no taste for it. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that Bruce’s numerous bumps and bruises haven’t come from spelunking because he’s actually taken him out to try it himself. The only issue is that despite Clark’s inherently trusting nature and the fact that he clearly wishes to see only the good in people he’s still occasionally quite perceptive, awkwardly so, and Jonathan can’t - or decides not to - stop him from finding out that Bruce isn’t sleeping the whole night through there in the manor after Jonathan supposedly leaves and Bruce makes a show of retiring for the evening. He’s frankly unsurprised when Clark arrives in the cave. The only surprise is that it’s taken him so long. 

“You’re not meant to be down here, Clark,” Jonathan says, but he’s unperturbed. He’s been expecting this and actually he suspects it’s not a terrible development. Clark has his own secret, after all, and he’s hardly likely to expose Bruce’s because even if he doesn’t know that Bruce knows, he’s fully aware that Jonathan does. 

Bruce is half way through putting on the suit now that Clark’s made his appearance. The situation at hand couldn’t be more obvious. 

“Clark,” he says. 

“Batman,” Clark replies.

Jonathan looks at Clark rather pointedly, brows raised. He glances over at Bruce for just a second then back to Clark and Clark understands. 

“It’s okay,” he says to Bruce and he shrugs expansively, a slightly bewildered look on his face as he starts to smile like the situation is so bizarre he can’t actually believe it. “It’s fine that you’re Batman,” he says. “I’m Superman.”

Bruce’s face is the picture of surprise. Jonathan is proud of him. 

The two of them go out into Gotham together and it’s endearing in a way to see them do so, if some measure of disconcerting to see Superman’s red cape in the cave and then later on the news, Batman and Superman there as allies, which is a point he thinks is worth the inconvenience of someone else knowing Bruce’s secret. An ally like Superman could be very useful in the long run, especially as public opinion of Superman is almost unanimously positive. Jonathan has to admit he finds it difficult to think that anyone other than Lex could ever find anything about Clark - or his superhuman alter-ego - to be remotely objectionable. He’s the perfect all-American son.

Jonathan’s still there when they return, reading his Arkham email incognito on Batman’s computer between conversations with certain key figures in his organisation. He’s still there because despite the fact that Bruce’s rate of recovery is somewhat truly disarming, he was still stabbed less than a week ago and it just wouldn’t do for him to pass out at an inconvenient moment. And so as Clark goes upstairs into the manor to sleep, apparently pleasantly buzzed from Superman’s sojourn in Gotham that will make a wonderful piece for his paper in the morning, Jonathan gives Bruce a check-up.

They do this often, because Alfred insists that Bruce be monitored closely and any injuries be treated often and early, and Jonathan can’t honestly say he finds any sort of fault in Alfred’s logic where this is concerned. Bruce strips out of the suit in the small medical bay there in the cave that they’ve needed with unfortunate regularity while Jonathan sits by and asks the requisite questions - does he have any pain? are there any new wounds to report? are the old ones healing? And then Jonathan’s inspection of his person becomes more personal, gloved hands that redress wounds or add or remove stitches, that palpate contusions to gauge Bruce’s reaction, all actions perfectly proper, perfectly clinical the way he imagines Alfred imagines. He knows every inch of Bruce’s body and can tell a new injury in an instant. He’s set broken fingers and stitched lacerations but there’s no need tonight and he’s grateful for that. Apparently Superman’s appearance has worked to their advantage.

There is, however, an angry bruise forming at Bruce’s right hip where he collided with the corner of a building on the end of a zipline and Jonathan’s medical opinion calls for the liberal application of ice. They go upstairs for that, Bruce tugging on a pair of sweats and a tank, detouring past the big old freezer in the kitchen on their way up to Bruce’s room where he can rest. The air’s still hot there and the ice pack in Jonathan’s hands feels blissfully cool; he holds it to Bruce’s hip over the baggy sweats once Bruce has stretched out on top of the sheets there in the master bedroom then he pauses, eases the sweats down over Bruce’s bruised hip and rests the ice pack against his skin. He realises he’s still wearing a pair of latex gloves and discards them on the nightstand before he returns one hand to the ice pack and rests the other against the warm space beside it there, low over Bruce’s abdomen, tracing the very edge of that bruise and then the length of a small scar, months old now, another that he stitched. His fingertips rub slow, absent circles against Bruce’s skin and as he notices the way that certain parts of Bruce are reacting to his touch he suddenly, acutely, finds he feels something less than clinical himself. It’s a genuine surprise to him, though not wholly unwelcome.

He could stop, he could recover, but the situation has, however, deteriorated to the extent that he decides it won’t precisely matter if he continues. Besides which, he will _not_ blame himself for feeling such a common urge every once in a while, especially not with someone so remarkably safe a companion as Bruce in such easy reach. Bruce raises his brows, questioning, and Jonathan understands. He is far from being a man of his word but this is not a point he’s thought he’d ever go back on. Apparently, neither has Bruce.

A month into their return to Gotham, he told Bruce that their relationship had to change. He put it to him simply that they could no longer maintain the sexual aspect of their relationship as it would begin to arouse interest that Bruce’s cover could not sustain. Bruce said he understood. This is only going to confuse matters. 

Jonathan unbuttons his shirt as Bruce watches, lets it drop to the floor and when he looks back at Bruce he’s smiling a wide, lazy smile that makes near irrational anger bubble up in him. “Don’t,” he says, harshly, putting on a huge and intensely fake smile of his own for a moment, gesturing to it with a wave of one hand. “This. Don’t do it.” And Bruce, after one long, thoroughly confused moment, lets the smile fade away to nothing and that’s better because _Bruce Wayne_ is not what he wants now. He wants what’s beneath. It’s sometimes startling how much different that is, and the difference it makes to him. What everyone else wants is a fantasy, a fallacy. What Jonathan wants now is what’s left when that fantasy is stripped away.

He tells himself, as he assists Bruce in removing his sweatpants and discards them on the floor, that this is how he’ll pull apart Bruce’s psyche just the fraction that he thinks it needs, so that the Bruce Wayne/Batman dichotomy he’s so carefully forged doesn’t ever work against him instead of for him. It’ll be effective, he thinks, as he watches him there, stretched out on his back, unsure, so uncertain. Jonathan told him they couldn’t have this and so he can’t possibly understand as Jonathan strips out of the rest of his own clothes, removes his glasses, sets them on the nightstand. His vision is comprehensively terrible without them but he doesn’t need to see there in the lamplight as he joins Bruce on the bed, as he straddles his thighs and rests his hands down against Bruce’s chest, the fingertips of one hand tracing the stitches he put there himself in Bruce’s upper arm. He doesn’t need to see as Bruce sits up, hands going so hesitantly to Jonathan’s waist and then resting at the small of his back as he’s not stopped from going further. Jonathan doesn’t need to see Bruce’s reaction when he realises this perhaps is not a test after all like so many other actions have been before this, when Bruce’s fingers go up to tangle in his hair, when he’s eased down almost tentatively into a kiss that’s too hot and too slow and too insensible to be happening at all. He should stop. It’s entirely his own decision not to. He’s never not in control.

Jonathan’s heart is hammering the whole time almost the same way that Bruce’s always does. The air’s too hot and his skin is slick with sweat, like Bruce’s is. He thinks about the melting ice there in the discarded ice pack, has a flash of an idea of it cold against skin but Bruce runs his fingers down the line of his spine to the cleft of his ass and Jonathan finds it difficult to think of anything else but that. It’s the heat, in the air and in Bruce’s hands as he touches him. It’s maddening. 

With the liberal application of lubricant from the drawer by the bed, Jonathan settles down to ride Bruce slowly, still straddling his hips. Bruce’s hands go up to the headboard behind him for leverage so he can shift his hips, so he can move against him and inside him and not just lie there passive, like this is something he’s taking an active part in and not just something that’s happening to him except Jonathan supposes both options are correct, in a way. Bruce doesn’t remember he was made to want this and for a moment Jonathan almost, almost regrets. He pushes the sentiment away. Bruce was wasting his life when they met, crashing cars like he’d been trying to atone for a sin he could neither name nor place. Jonathan has given him purpose beyond anything he’d ever thought to imagine. 

But it’s a pity he can’t look away from Bruce’s face as he’s inside him, away from his eyes. It’s a pity Bruce is flushed and breathless and littered with scars that Jonathan knows intimately, a pity that he takes Jonathan’s cock in one hand and strokes the way he does, slowly, measured, like he understands something Jonathan doesn’t when of course Jonathan understands because he’s smarter than Bruce could ever hope to be. That’s just the truth, not ego at all.

He’s overlooked the fact that Bruce knows his body just as well as he knows Bruce’s. He’s overlooked dozens of nights where this was more easily shared than words in the dark and Bruce learned every inch of him by touch. They push each other, drive each other, Bruce’s free hand gripping at Jonathan’s hip so tightly he’s sure he’ll bruise and he half hopes he will, just for the hell of it. 

They move faster. Bruce’s hips buck harder. He puts his hand over Bruce’s mouth as he comes to muffle the sound he makes, so only Clark would be able to hear it with his superhuman sense of hearing, if he’s still awake. He bites down on his own lip to keep from shouting out when he finally comes, too, erratic, not so very long after, hot tension spreading through him with an epicentre that is Bruce’s callused hand or maybe his still-stiff cock still inside him. They try to catch their breath together in the hot air, Jonathan’s knees there in damp patches on the sheets, Bruce’s hair sticking down to his forehead. Jonathan laughs, breathlessly, as he shifts to stretch out on the bed and Bruce, to his credit, only seems confused by that for a moment. It’s like he’s figured something out, like something just slipped into place. Jonathan knows that Bruce has missed this, has had months engaged in a pantomime of sex with models and socialites but never the one person who knows him inside out, who knows Bruce is broken, and so perhaps that’s all it is. 

Then, unexpectedly, Bruce rolls away and leaves the bed. He stands, naked, completely uninhibited because that’s how Jonathan’s taught him to be with him. “Come with me,” he says. And so, out of sheer blind intrigue, Jonathan summons the energy to rise and follow him.

There’s a quip on his tongue about wardrobes and Narnia as Bruce opens the closet door except that dies as he sweeps aside a rack of suits, presses in and slides away a long section of old wooden panelling and reveals a heavy door behind. Jonathan is then certain what this is, so certain that when Bruce opens the door on the dark room beyond, barely any light entering there through the windowless closet in a darkened bedroom sometime past 3am, he steps inside and walks without a second’s hesitation to the bed he knows without a doubt he’ll find there in the dark. He knows the number of steps to take because it’s the same as there are back there in a plain white cell in Arkham Asylum. It’s the same as a bedroom in an opulent Metropolis apartment that they left behind a year ago. Without telling him he’s done it, Bruce has made himself a home in a house that he can never again feel is his home. And now he’s taken him to it. 

It’s cooler there, in the dark inside what was maybe once just the Wayne family panic room and is now something almost entirely different. The chill of the fresh white sheets sends a shiver down Jonathan’s spine and then Bruce closes the door. He joins him, slips an arm around him, as if this is the most natural thing in the world to either of them. And though Jonathan did not mean to spend the night, had a taxi home in mind, he decides he will. It won’t hurt to do so, he thinks, because he can use this against him later. And maybe he’ll ask Bruce, when the Joker’s dead, about all the other things he suspects he might be hiding.

Bruce drifts to sleep quite quickly, his pulse slowing there under Jonathan’s fingers. Jonathan wishes he could sleep that soundly, wishes he could find this place and their intimacy as comforting as Bruce seems to, but he’s waiting for word on his latest little endeavour, unsure if it will go to plan but knowing that he had to try. His intellect has been so woefully inadequate against the Joker. Perhaps if he had more time and there were less at stake...but everything is unravelling. The speed at which it’s happening surprises even him.

His sleep is fitful. There’s more invested in his success than he’s comfortable believing.

***

The aftermath of the shooting is far from pleasant. He sits in the bullpen of Gotham City’s police headquarters and he lies to Detective Gordon because he’s not sure how else he can react. Gordon is very good at his job but Jonathan is exceptional; he tells him just enough of the truth for his story to be verified by the facts and nothing by which he could possibly incriminate himself. He’s been through this particular charade before, more than once, with vast success. 

“And that’s when you shot him?”

Jonathan nods, winces as he does so and that makes him all the more convincing. He has a bruise across his throat where a man’s hands were recently pressed in tight to match the band across his face where he was quite clearly pistol-whipped. He thinks considering his particular proclivities he really ought to have learned self defence at some point but he’s never found the time or the inclination. “Yes,” he says. “That’s when I shot him.”

Arkham’s security has always been woefully lacking, which is a fact that has, today, become publicly and undeniably apparent. A man, ostensibly a visitor, came in through the front doors at a little after 2pm as the nurses changed shift. He signed in at the front desk and received a visitor’s pass. From there he entered the ward and shot the first orderly he saw in the head, beat a nurse to the floor but the butt of his handgun and sent the lucky majority of the patients scattering. The facility’s temporary director sustained a bullet wound to the shoulder while ushering staff into his office where he locked the door before the shooter took down two patients and the janitor. He then entered the office of one Jonathan Crane where, no more than two minutes later, he was himself shot dead in the ensuing struggle. Gotham PD were on the scene in ten. The coroner’s office wheeled out the bodies on gurneys and James Gordon asked the doctor to go with him. Jonathan couldn’t think of any way to decline, as much as he wished he could. 

“You’re a lucky man, Dr Crane.”

Jonathan nods again, winces again. “Yes,” he says. “I am.”

What he doesn’t tell him is that he is the reason for all of this. He doesn’t tell him that the shooter came into Arkham to beat and kill his colleagues and then pass him a cellphone. He doesn’t tell him _he’s_ the one who started the struggle once he’d heard what the caller had to say, because he wanted to wrap his hands around that caller’s neck. The best alternative he had was to struggle hard and press the muzzle of the shooter’s gun up under his chin and, in a moment of calm, pull the trigger. 

“We’ll be in touch if we have any questions,” Gordon says, by way of dismissal. Jonathan gives him a small, pained smile as he stands and he leaves the station. It’s not a place that he likes to be, after all, considering what they would do to him if they knew exactly what he’s done over the years, and he has somewhere else to be.

He takes the monorail home, not ignorant to the odd looks cast his way by his fellow passengers at the darkening bruises over his face and the blood-spattered clothing that somehow, mystifyingly, the Gotham crime scene investigators have neglected to collect from him, but rather ignoring them entirely. He knows Bruce is back at the manor under Alfred’s watchful eye and mostly healed, but the sheets from the previous week’s attack are still caked in his dried blood, the stale summer air in his bedroom still heavy with the smell of it in a way he suspects will last till winter. He washes the new blood from his face and his hair and his hands and the lenses of his glasses and he changes quickly. Then he picks up his briefcase and he leaves the house. 

“Guess who,” the Joker said, on the cellphone that was passed to him by a man who’d just shot his way quite unnecessarily to his office. He could have walked straight in with no fuss at all, thanks to Arkham’s shoddy security, but that’s not the Joker’s way.

“I don’t have to guess.”

“Then I guess you know your little magic trick didn’t make me disappear.”

“Apparently.”

They paused. Jonathan had nothing else to say because now that his attempt had failed there was nothing left to say at all. He still doesn’t know how many of his men are dead but he can imagine what the Joker’s done to them. So much for peace in Gotham City. 

“The restaurant, six PM,” the Joker said. “Come alone or the next time the Bat’s dead.”

He believed him, believes him, and so that’s why he goes, why he opens the back door with the key he keeps ready on his keychain for just such occasions. He’s wearing his mask but instead of a canister of gas he has his gun in his hand. He’s not surprised that the Joker’s there in the kitchen already, sitting at the table slurping from a bowl of pasta and meatballs with the chef lying dead at his feet. He’s not even surprised when two goons in clown masks beat him to his knees before he can so much as fire a shot, adding bruises to bruises in sharp little starbursts of pain. 

The two goons haul him back up to his feet then with a wrench of his shoulders and tie his hands. They throw the rope over the artistically, conveniently exposed low kitchen rafters and pull him up onto tiptoe, the toes of his freshly shined shoes barely reaching the tile. Then the Joker shoots them both, the gunfire echoing loudly in the relatively enclosed space and Jonathan’s left there, dangling, while the two henchmen expire noisily on the floor. Then, silence. A trickle of sweat runs down his spine. He should be scared, perhaps, but all he feels as the Joker comes in close to remove his mask is disappointment.

He doesn’t ask him what he wants because he knows precisely what that is; he wants Gotham, just the way that Jonathan does and has. Of course, this was always going to be a trap. He knew it was, _knew_ it was, and still he came, walked into it willingly even knowing that none of his own particular weaponry of choice would work against this man with the thrift store suit and eyes that have a look just like Jonathan sees in his own from time to time. And so why is he here? Why didn’t he call Bruce, get him out of bed or pull him away from a shopping excursion or wherever he might be today, send him instead despite his still-healing injuries or at least bring him there with him as backup or a bodyguard? It’s because the Joker would have killed him, of that he is absolutely and positively certain, and he quite simply could not have allowed that to happen. He’d rather… oh no. Oh _no_. He could almost laugh with the irony, finds he actually does so. It’s perfect. It’s ludicrous. The Joker isn’t the one who’s done this to him because he’s done it to himself.

The moment in which he realises the extent to which he’s deceived himself over the precise nature of his relationship with Bruce is the last clear moment that he’ll ever have. As the Joker sprays him liberally with his own fear serum, the room begins to shake except he knows for a fact that it doesn’t. The Joker’s wide smile comes alive as he laughs and laughs and the sound echoes infinitely, refractions of refractions coming to Jonathan’s ears in tilting waves. The fact that he knows what’s happening makes it all the more terrible because Bruce has no idea where he is so there’s no hope that he’ll come; there’s no hope that he’ll bring the antidote, at least not in time. 

By the time Bruce finds him, he’ll be gone. Jonathan Crane and all that he is will have ceased to be. Perhaps the one consolation is that what losing him will do to Bruce because it will light a fire in him that’ll burn everything down. He’ll be the end of the Joker and he’ll take over where Jonathan’s left off, succeed where Jonathan’s failed because he’s given him everything he’ll ever need to do it. Bruce will be fine without him. Maybe that was all the work he ever really intended to do.

And so all that’s left for Jonathan to do is watch the Joker watch him go insane.

***

Bruce wakes alone and for a second, in the instant after waking, he wonders where Jonathan is. He always wonders and it’s only recently occurred to him to ask why that is exactly but today, he thinks, he _knows_ , is the first time in months that he’s had any real reason to wonder. Jonathan was here last night and he’s not here now. It’s kind of unsettling. He tells himself it shouldn’t be until it isn’t.

Once upon a time he’d have needed time to steady himself but not now. Not anymore. He sighs and he rubs his eyes and he leaves the bed in the room that’s hidden in Wayne Manor pretty much like he is now and he goes into the master bathroom, opens the blinds and stands in front of the mirror. He dislikes mirrors these days, since what they all call an accident to avoid calling a breakdown and even that word covers up something else, obscures the truth that no one wants to know. Mirrors swim with things that aren’t there that he’s learned to ignore most of the time and he can now, usually, watch his reflection as he shaves without seeing blood dripping down his arms, without almost _feeling_ it, that he knows isn’t there. He’s got it under control. He’s fine.

Jonathan probably went to work, which makes sense because Jonathan’s a busy guy. He has patients, though Bruce wonders idly as he brushes his teeth and doesn’t think about what it would be like if he spat them all out with the toothpaste whether Jonathan really should have patients. Sometimes he’s concerned for them or maybe just for Dick because what Jonathan doesn’t know, what he hasn’t allowed himself to know, is that Bruce remembers everything. _Everything_. 

He dresses, sweats and a white tank that shows off more of his injuries than he ought to show off if more for Alfred’s sake than for Clark’s but sometimes it’s hard to remember or hard to care. He finds them both in the kitchen, eating pancakes that Alfred’s made, Alfred making Clark laugh, and so he joins them with a smile that he doesn’t feel and drowns his pancakes in maple syrup that he hasn’t liked since before his parents died and forces himself to eat. He’s confident. He’s convincing. 

He’s thinking about Jonathan and the plans that Jonathan thinks he doesn’t know he has as he tells Clark they should go out to lunch before he leaves. They’ll toss Clark’s bag into the miniscule-to-non-existent trunk of one of the Lamborghinis or Ferraris or maybe the McLaren and he’ll let Clark drive because he’s been salivating over them all week in a way that’s odd for a guy who grew up with pickups and cornfields and Lex’s own dinged up, scratched down supercars. Between the two billionaires, Bruce is pretty sure there’s not one undamaged vehicle.

“It’ll be fun,” he says, while Alfred’s out of earshot. “It’s not like it’d hurt you even if you crashed it into a wall. I’ve done it myself. So’s Lex. We’re still here.” Clark laughs, colours a fraction at the mention of Lex’s name. He likes Clark; it’s a real, honest shame that Lex doesn’t anymore. 

After lunch he drops Clark at the station to take a train back to Metropolis that he could beat there by hours if he flew, but Bruce understands all about the need for cover. Bruce throws an arm around him on the platform as they say goodbye, that kind of one-armed macho hug that he’s learned from watching other people though physical contact is still awkward for him, even after all these months, after all the women, even with Clark. Even if Clark’s the only one in the world apart from Jonathan who he doesn’t see as some kind of a lurid monster without squinting hard and there’s an irony there if he thinks about it, when he thinks about what Clark really is.

“Come again soon,” Bruce tells him. “Anytime.” And he means it, he thinks. As long as he can retreat to his room at the end of the day, his room inside a room, Bruce can have all the company that the world around him thinks he should have. 

“You don’t work,” Clark points out, smiling, standing there on the step up to the train door with his bag on his shoulder. “It’s your turn to visit.”

“Then just come by one night.” Bruce raises his brows significantly. “We’ll go out.”

The look Clark gives him says he might just do that. After all, he could be back in Metropolis by dawn and no one would ever know he’d been gone.

They double parked his new Lamborghini and he adds the paperwork for the fine to the pile in the glovebox that Alfred will take care of for him. Jonathan tells him Bruce Wayne can’t live his life like anyone else and so he’s practically keeping the Gotham legal system solvent with his parking fines. The engine roars to life in a way that he’s had to train himself not to flinch at though he knows he used to find it thrilling, and he heads out to double park somewhere else. He has a spendthrift reputation to uphold so he’ll pick up a couple of salesgirls in a high-end boutique, buy them Jimmy Choos and take them out to dinner even if it’s the last thing he wants to do. He can see the world as it really is if he concentrates, _really_ concentrates, but it’s tiring and so mostly he just lets everything around him dissolve into a scene from _Jacob’s Ladder_ and then the pretty girls will be nightmares. Everyone thinks he’s recovered so well but he knows nightmares. He can deal with nightmares.

It’s sometime past nine and he’s laughing like he’s drunk when he hears someone mention ‘what happened at Arkham.’ He’s still listening as one of the awful-pretty salesgirls, who Bruce is sure must be delightful on a personal level even if she’s having a boisterous dinner with a very public womaniser, slips her hand over the inside of his thigh and gives him a smile he guesses might be coy if he weren’t seeing a twist to her mouth that’s probably not there. He probably even looks like he’s enjoying her attention when her fingers dip between his legs and he shuffles his thighs wider but he’s hearing _shooting_ and his mind’s somewhere else. He’s hearing staff and patients dead. His mind is screaming _Jonathan_.

He leaves abruptly in a scatter of hundred dollar bills and a laughing apology that the girls don’t seem to take badly at all. There’s another goddamn parking fine on his windshield that he jams into the glovebox as he pulls away from the curb and dials the manor’s landline. Alfred confirms the report in a rather tight tone; he’s one of Jonathan Crane’s biggest fans in the most muted way since Bruce’s recovery and he’s pretty obviously concerned while he tries not to sound like he is. 

“I’m afraid I haven’t been able to contact Dr Crane for several hours,” Alfred admits. 

“I’ll find him.”

Jonathan’s been missing for hours while Bruce has been wining and dining two girls whose names he currently remembers but artistically forgot. He’s not going to let this happen.

He has to circle by the manor to change into the suit and he resents the wasted time though he knows sweeping about Gotham in an overpriced polo shirt and the second most recognisable car in the city is a good way to get himself arrested. He goes back out immediately. He’s unsurprised to find he thinks he knows where to go. Jonathan’s never been coy about his business where Bruce is concerned because having Batman as a bodyguard has been useful more than once. Bruce knows where it happens.

When he comes in through the restaurant’s kitchen skylight in a hail of glass and a swirl of his cape, the Joker’s there. 

“Batman doesn’t kill,” Jonathan’s told him, more than once, more than ten times, over and over. “Never. Batman is a hero. He’s not a murderer.” He remembers the dark flash in Jonathan’s blue eyes each time he says it because that’s how he knows he means it. “It’s important. Don’t forget.”

Bruce believes that. He believes it’s important, maybe not just because Jonathan told him so. But that doesn’t even slow him for a second as he strides toward the Joker. It doesn’t stop him sweeping him up against the nearest wall with one gloved hand while the Joker laughs like there’s nothing so hilarious in all the world. The sound bounces off the walls and rings in Bruce’s ears and he’s hideous even when Bruce pushes through into reality from the terror in his head. 

“You won’t kill me,” he says, rasps, as Bruce presses down on his throat. “You’re _Batman_.”

He is, but that doesn’t stop him. The fins fixed at the sides of his gauntlets have been cut razor sharp; he pulls up one arm, presses, drags the edge of them across the Joker’s throat and opens a bright red smile there to match the paint at his face. The Joker clutches at his gaping, gushing throat and Bruce can see the surprise in his eyes, the shock, because he was so _sure_ he wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. He’s _Batman_. 

He slumps against him, bleeding over him between his fingers and Bruce pushes him away in disgust to bleed out on the dirty floor, bloodstained gloves clawing ever more slowly at the ground. All he can hear as the Joker dies is burbling laughter. It takes him a moment to realise it’s Jonathan who’s laughing and not the man who’s lying there dead. 

He cuts Jonathan down with the same bloodied gauntlet and takes the rope from his bruised wrists as Jonathan shakes against him, with laughter and something else completely. What’s happened is obvious and he’s too far gone for the antiserum, Bruce can see that, Bruce realises this sickly and hotly and desperately but he tries it anyway, injecting the side of his neck. He knows what Jonathan’s seeing when he looks at him because it’s what he sees when he looks at himself but he can’t take off the cowl here and now. He’ll have to get him back to the manor first. He’s sorry for that.

“Close your eyes,” he tells him, because sometimes that’s helped him. Jonathan closes his eyes. His breath comes too quickly. Bruce knows exactly how he feels, even now he knows, and so he takes off Jonathan’s glasses and he tucks them into a pocket, he eases him in against him in spite of the hot blood staining his suit that transfers awkwardly but that can’t be helped. He kisses him, softly, hotly, and for an instant Jonathan can breathe again.

“Bruce,” he says. And Bruce thinks, hopes, that maybe he’s saved just a little of him with the antiserum but it’s too soon to tell and he can hear sirens anyway. He knows they have to go, and so they go.They turn for the door. He keeps a hand over Jonathan’s eyes. He doesn’t want him to see what he sees. But for a moment before they go, he pauses. 

He’s seen the mask before, of course, many times. Jonathan showed it to him more than once in the beginning, back there in his room in Arkham and so many times after, a kind of exposure therapy before he finally put it on and let Bruce see that, too. Now Bruce stoops for a moment and picks the mask from the floor, looks at it in his hand, watches as it writhes but doesn’t move at all. He’s not scared. For once he’s not scared because he knows exactly what he has to do.

He takes Jonathan away before the police can find him. He takes him home.

***

The black paint from around Bruce’s eyes, from under the mask, is smudged down across his cheekbones. It’s under his fingernails. It’s smeared across Jonathan’s temple mixed with a streak of dried blood that doesn’t belong to either of them. No one will be sorry the Joker’s gone. 

Jonathan laughs when he sees the room, the sound harsh, ragged like it’s tearing at his throat and maybe it is or maybe that’s Bruce’s mind playing tricks. When Bruce comes back with a washcloth to wipe away the blood, Jonathan’s arms are wrapped around his knees, he’s rocking, shaking, his eyes screwed shut. Bruce remembers how that feels. It could overwhelm him even now if he just let it. He won’t let it overwhelm either of them.

 

Bruce sits down on the bed and with a marked flinch Jonathan lets him wipe away the blood from his face. He looks at him; he cringes but he looks at him and for a moment he can hold his gaze before he squeezes his eyes closed again. He’ll keep him there, Bruce thinks, in the manor with him, in that room, because Jonathan Crane can’t go to Arkham. He’s there behind the terror and Bruce can see him if he looks closely enough. He’s not even nearly as broken as Bruce was, just a fraction more scared because somewhere inside he understands what’s happened to him. Bruce knows what that’s like.

He remembers everything. He was never fully erased, never quite the blank slate Jonathan thought he was. He knows what Jonathan did to him but he can’t quite seem to blame him for it, not for any of it, not for himself and not even for Dick. Jonathan breaks people because he can, broke Bruce because he could, because he found the concept amusing and sometimes Bruce can see his point. 

But the thing Bruce sees that Jonathan never has is that he never, _never_ had any obligation to put him back together again. Bruce is pretty sure that’s what’s called a labour of love. He’s pretty sure Jonathan would tell him that’s absurd but he knows whose opinion he trusts on that point.

The scarecrow mask is in the drawer by the bed out there in the other room, the big bed he’s shared with more people than he wants to remember and will probably have to even now. He’s left it there because he can’t show it to Jonathan now, not like this, but they’ll get there. Jonathan rebuilt Bruce from less than this and so Bruce can rebuild Jonathan. He knows exactly what to do like no one else ever could.

Jonathan sleeps fitfully that night, closed behind the door in a room that’s now just as much his as it is Bruce’s. Bruce lies awake, his vision in the dark dancing with the image of a scarecrow. 

He’s already wearing one mask, he thinks, so why not another? He can be both. He can be multiple. He can be Jonathan until Jonathan’s strong enough to be himself again then they’ll be multiple together. They’ll be the monsters in the dark and they won’t be afraid of anything.


End file.
